Cars

We’ve had a lot of talk about car handbrakes (a new obsession) in the last couple of weeks, but today Archie surprised me.

Archie was on the computer and came to fetch me. Click clicked his way to google maps and using that together with the talker told me my neighbour has a new car (she does, although I don’t know which car it is, her husband told me last week they were changing cars). Then he showed me another car that has changed.

Archie could have communicated this pre-talker day by pointing to the cars that have changed on google maps and saying ‘nanee’ whilst signing ‘broken’ (nanee was his pronunciation for broken). But today he could use a lot of other words as well. ‘Car gone’ ‘different car’ ‘green car gone new black car’ ‘car finished’ and variations of these. All these words – car, different, gone, finished, green, black, he didn’t really have a way to express easily prior to the talker.

It was a short interaction but the variety of language used and the flexibility Archie showed in joining different words was noteworthy.